When India and China clash, it’s often Tibetans doing the fighting

Open this photo in gallery:

The recruiters promised good wages, prestige and elite training, but also something else: the chance to fight China. For thousands of young Tibetan exiles, this has led them to join the Special Frontier Force (SFF), a secretive Indian military unit that patrols the country’s borders and reports to its intelligence bureau.

“We were told this was a good job and a good way to serve the Tibetan cause,” a former SFF commando told The Globe and Mail. “We got the sense we were training to fight China. Even if it’s just six battalions, our elders would say we were the elite core of a potential future Tibetan army.”

The Globe is not identifying the former soldier so they can speak freely about the SFF, as much about the unit is still officially classified and veterans are forbidden from talking to the media.

He was born and raised in Dharamshala, the town in the Indian Himalayas that has been the centre of the Tibetan exile community since the Dalai Lama fled there in 1959. He joined the SFF at 21 and spent 10 years in the unit, patrolling in the border areas of Ladakh and Uttarakhand, where Chinese and Indian troops have faced off for decades over the hotly disputed Line of Actual Control, the de facto border.

On Dec. 9, the two sides clashed violently for the first time in years, after Chinese troops allegedly crossed this border near Tawang, an Indian town and one of the most important places for Tibetan Buddhism outside of Chinese-controlled Tibet itself.

The SFF’s roots go back to the Chinese invasion of Tibet, when CIA-funded guerrilla units fought a desperate rearguard action against the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). In his book, The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong, the Dalai Lama’s brother Gyalo Thondup – who helped raise and lead the rebel force – writes of how in the 1960s he encouraged India to take over sponsorship of the Tibetan resistance fighters.

These suggestions “had always been dismissed with shrug of the shoulder and a wave of the hand,” he said, until a border war with China in 1962. “Within a month, 6,000 young Tibetan men, mostly former soldiers from the Tibetan army, the ­Dalai Lama’s bodyguards and resistance fighters, had volunteered. The recruits were happy to be trained and eager to fight.”

Manoj Joshi, a distinguished fellow at the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation, said the SFF was one of a number of “stay-behind forces all along the Himalayas” raised during this time, with the idea they could be used to conduct guerrilla warfare behind Chinese lines in the event of a full-scale invasion. Today, he said, the SFF is “something of an anachronism,” with the chances of it conducting actions inside Tibet made almost impossible, given the intense fortification of the border on the Chinese side and huge troop presence there.

Despite the small size of the SFF – believed to be around 5,000 troops – it has played a role in almost every major Indian border dispute, from clandestine operations along the frontier with China to the Bangladesh War of 1971 and multiple clashes with Pakistan. During training, the former commando said, recruits are drilled on this military history, which is unknown by much of the general public – a secrecy many soldiers and veterans resent, seeing it as diminishing their achievements and sacrifices.

This has begun to change in recent years, as the SFF’s role in India’s increasingly tense rivalry with China has come to the forefront.

In September, 2020, SFF company leader Tenzin Nyima was killed when he stepped on a landmine while patrolling in Ladakh, weeks after a clash between Chinese and Indian troops in the area. That incident, in Galwan Valley, was the bloodiest fight along the border in decades – hundreds of troops brawling with fists, clubs and other makeshift weapons – leaving at least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers dead.

Mr. Nyima’s funeral, coming as tensions between India and Chinese were at a peak, was attended by figures from the Tibetan exile government and India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Ram Madhav, then-BJP secretary-general, reportedly praised Mr. Nyima as “a Tibetan who laid down his life protecting our borders,” though he later clarified he was not speaking on behalf of New Delhi.

Mr. Nyima’s brother, Tenzin Nyandak, told the South China Morning Post at the time that “every Tibetan wants to fight China, because that fight is not just for India, it is also for our own land.”

At the funeral in the Ladakh capital of Leh, Mr. Nyima’s coffin was draped in the Tibetan snow lion flag along with the Indian tricolour. His death attracted massive attention to the SFF in the Indian media and calls by both Tibetan and Indian veterans for the unit to be given its due recognition.

This may have led the Indian government in August, 2022, to commend two Indian commanders for their role in Operation Snow Leopard, as the 2020 manoeuvres in Ladakh were called. This followed posthumous honours granted in February, 2022, to SFF deputy leader Tenzin Norbu, who died while patrolling the frontier with Pakistan in 1988.

All the attention paid to the SFF in the Indian media prompted angry articles in Chinese state-controlled outlets, accusing New Delhi of “playing the Tibet card.” The nationalist tabloid Global Times described SFF troops as “cannon fodder in India’s attempt to nibble into China’s interests on the border issue.”

Retired Lieutenant-General Deependra Singh Hooda, former head of the Indian army’s Northern Command and an analyst at the Delhi Policy Group, told The Globe that despite the SFF’s relative fame in recent years, “you will not find the government officially admitting the existence of these groups.”

He noted the number of Tibetan troops was “honestly very few,” and said the SFF was perhaps more useful to New Delhi as “part of general information warfare.” (The Indian army in contrast has 1.2 million troops.) News articles and careful leaks “show the other side that here we have some Tibetans in our campaign, without officially admitting it,” he added.

The SFF are not the only Tibetan troops on the Himalayan frontier. The PLA has recruited heavily in recent years in Chinese-occupied Tibet – some exile groups describe this as forced conscription – with local soldiers not facing the same struggles with altitude sickness that have been a major problem for forces operating on the Tibetan plateau.

When his squad was patrolling the border, the former SFF member said, they would occasionally meet PLA troops who appeared to be Tibetan, though always led by Chinese officers. He said such encounters were “demoralizing,” adding “China has brainwashed them to fight their brothers.”

“They may think that if it’s Tibetan against Tibetan, we might not be so aggressive,” he said.